''Belshazzar's Feast'' is a major painting by

Rembrandt Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (; ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), mononymously known as Rembrandt was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and Drawing, draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in ...

now in the

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of more than 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current di ...

, London. The painting is Rembrandt's attempt to establish himself as a painter of large,

baroque The Baroque ( , , ) is a Western Style (visual arts), style of Baroque architecture, architecture, Baroque music, music, Baroque dance, dance, Baroque painting, painting, Baroque sculpture, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from ...

history paintings. The date of the painting is unknown, but most sources give a date between 1635 and 1638.

The story

The story of Belshazzar and the writing on the wall originates in the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

Book of Daniel. The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar looted the Temple in Jerusalem and stole sacred artefacts such as golden cups. His son Belshazzar used these cups for a great feast where the hand of God appeared and wrote the inscription on the wall prophesying the downfall of Belshazzar's reign. The text on the wall says "''mene, mene, tekel, u-farsin''". Biblical scholars interpret this to mean "God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians". The inscription on the wall is an interesting element in this painting. Rembrandt lived in the Jewish Quarter of Amsterdam and "derived the form of

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

inscription from a book by his friend, the learned Rabbi and printer, Menasseh ben Israel, yet mistranscribed one of the characters and arranged them in columns, rather than right to left, as Hebrew is written." This last detail is essential as it relates to the question of why Belshazzar and his advisers were not able to decipher the inscription and had to send for Daniel to help them with it. The biblical story does not identify the language of the cryptic message, but it is generally assumed to be

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

, which, like Hebrew, is written in right-to-left rows, and not in right-to-left columns as in the painting. Although there is no accepted explanation why the Babylonian priests were unable to decipher the writing, the point of this unconventional arrangement – reading the text in the painting in the conventional row-wise left-to-right order results in a garbled message – may be to suggest why the text proved incomprehensible to the Babylonian wise men; This explanation is in accordance with the opinion of the amora Shmuel, which is mentioned in the

Babylonian Talmud The Talmud (; ) is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law (''halakha'') and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the centerpiece of Jewi ...

, Tractate

Sanhedrin The Sanhedrin (Hebrew and Middle Aramaic , a loanword from , 'assembly,' 'sitting together,' hence ' assembly' or 'council') was a Jewish legislative and judicial assembly of either 23 or 70 elders, existing at both a local and central level i ...

, 22a, among various dissenting views.

Reception

The painting was in possession of the Earl of Derby at

Knowsley Hall Knowsley Hall is a stately home near Liverpool in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley, Merseyside, England. It is the ancestral home of the Stanley family, the Earls of Derby. The hall is surrounded by of parkland, which contains the Knowsley S ...

since 1736. The picture, however, was barely known beyond England, and it was not considered a masterpiece.Dohe, Sebastian (2014): ''Gewogen und zu leicht befunden? Die Rezeption von Rembrandts „Gastmahl des Belsazar“''. In: Justus Lange/Sebastian Dohe/Anne Harmssen (eds.): ''Mene, mene tekel. Das Gastmahl des Belsazar in der niederländischen Kunst.'' Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, , pp. 61–81. As it was exhibited at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, the curator George Scharf wrote: "The whole picture, notwithstanding the boldness of the attitudes, is tame, and inadequate in execution." This lack of admiration can be explained in comparison to contemporary depictions of the biblical story, especially '' Belshazzar's Feast'' by John Martin (c. 1821), that earned much more reputation by its size and grandeur of its composition. This assessment changed in the second half of the 20th century together with the revaluation of Rembrandt's historical paintings. After ''Belshazzar's Feast'' was acquired by the National Gallery in 1964, it became very popular and was used many times as an illustration for commercial products like album covers. In 2014, it was the third most licensed image of the National Gallery.

Painting materials

Rembrandt's handling of painting materials and his painting technique in ''Belshazzar's Feast'' are both exceptional and do not compare to any of his other works. The palette of this painting is unusually rich encompassing such pigments as

vermilion Vermilion (sometimes vermillion) is a color family and pigment most often used between antiquity and the 19th century from the powdered mineral cinnabar (a form of mercury sulfide). It is synonymous with red orange, which often takes a moder ...

, smalt, lead-tin-yellow, yellow and red lakes, ochres and azurite.

Notes

References

*
Bruyn, J. et al., Belshazzar’s Feast, in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings
Stichting Foundation Rembrandt Research Project Volume 3, 1989, pp 124–133

External links